e is the base of the natural logarithm. you can get it by taking (1 + x)1/x and let x stream off to infinity. To the first ten decimal places, its value is 2.7182818285... i is the imaginary unit. you probably saw it in algebra when you tried taking the square root of a negative number. it does even funkier things when used as an exponent. spin me 'round, baby. pi is as old as the circle itself. take how far it is to walk around a circle and divide that by how far it is to walk from one side of the circle to the other along a straight line through its center, that's pi. the bible may say it equals 3, but i'd trust that as far as i could roll it. go with 3.1415926535897932... instead. 1 is the loneliest num... no it's not. but if you multiply it by anything, nothing changes. and you have to start counting somewhere. 0 was a trick. it took forever for most societies to find and use it. the mayans had it -- a mathematical representation for nothing -- about 2000 years ago. maybe earlier. humans just don't seem comfortable with nothing. stare into the void, stare into the abyss, yadda yadda yadda. add zero to anything and you're back where you started. and here we have this mathematical sentence that ties them all together. i think Euler was the first one to write it -- i'll have to check. it's so neatly packaged -- you can build every number you'll ever need from what you have here. and here's how they all fit together. i had to start here. i remember the first time Mr. Esch wrote this on the board. too beautiful in its symmetry, in its completeness. this is all you need for now.